Ex-Wife
Ursula Parrott
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Recommended by Gayle
‘Another absolute banger in the excellent Faber Editions series of rediscoveries. Ex-Wife follows Patricia, a New Yorker who unexpectedly finds herself divorced at 24, as she works out how to live and who to be in her new role of ‘ex-wife’. It’s full of dead-pan humour, and so modern I refuse to believe it was first published in 1929. A Heartburn for the Jazz Age!’
From the publisher
'A forgotten classic: darkly funny and startlingly contemporary, full of witty one-liners and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations about romance, work, and life.' Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually
Lord, I have been more chased than chaste . . . It feels remarkable to be a deserted wife when one is only twenty-four.
New York, 1924. Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in 'Love-Outside-Marriage'. Until they don't. Or, really, until he doesn't. So when Peter pushes for divorce with increasing violence, Patricia has to forge a new life as a single woman: as an ex-wife.
A sensational bestseller in 1929, yet utterly timeless, Ex-Wife plunges us into the 'era of the one-night stand'. It evokes not only the Manhattan bars, fashion advertising offices, female friendships and all-night parties of a dazzling city, but the hollow affairs, emotional hangovers, backstreet abortions, and struggles for sexual freedoms amidst the moral double standards of a patriarchal world.